Posted
by
timothyon Thursday November 15, 2012 @03:06PM
from the on-earth-as-it-is-on-endor dept.

New submitter diabolicalrobot writes "The Robotics Institute at CMU has been developing systems to learn from humans. Using a Machine Learning class of techniques called Imitation Learning our group has developed AI software for a small commercially available off-the-shelf ARdrone to autonomously fly through the dense trees for over 3.4 km in experimental runs. We are also developing methods to do longer range planning with such purely vision-guided UAVs. Such technology has a lot of potential impact for surveillance, search and rescue and allowing UAVs to safely share airspace with manned airspace."

Nice to know you guys have a proper sense of humor. Of course, given that your video predates my comment by a couple of months, I should probably have been modded redundant. I'll give myself a break since the link wasn't directly accessible from any of the links in TFS.

Violence is just the low hanging fruit of applying robotic vision, well low hanging fruit that pays very well.

There are many applications for this, whether it helps a computer to guide a blind person though a crowded lobby, allowing a driverless car to be safer and more efficient, or even warning you that your car is about to be hit by another car.

I never went into robotic vision because nearly all of the immediate applications are military.

Just like radar, and jet engines and rockets and spaceflight and GPS and encryption and antibiotics, yet all those things turned out to be slightly beneficial (or more than slightly, in the case of... all of them) to humanity as a whole.

That is only true because that is where most of the funding it probably coming from. Computer vision has huge potential outside the military. Computer vision is not the first massively useful technology that came out efficiently killing people and it will not be the last. Hell, most of the first seeds of the computer, electronics, and internet industries were planted because of the military.

Yeah, but going to jail because you shot down a government owned drone probably isn't going to be worth it. It's not like they won't be able to see who shot it down, and exactly where/when. Heck, it might even shoot back! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU [youtube.com]

I want a drone that flies around my houses and fixes all the dren that I don't want to fix.

You know, broken light bulbs, empties the gutters, etc.

You can already program the ar.drone to fly a preset flight path... just attach a little shovel and have it fly around scooping the gutter daily, all you'd need to work out is how to properly apply the duct tape, and setup some type of charging station it could land on by its-self.

In the real world a UAV will need to deal with horizontal features like power lines, fences and fence rails - all things that trip up human aviators far too often. The first video in TFA showed it using the increasing horizontal (left-right) velocity of picture elements to correlate with something vertical like a tree approaching the monocular camera, but ended abruptly as the AR.Drone was approaching a wooden fence. I would have really liked to have seen it deal with that fence as well, say by momentarily